The Modernity Project Can Create Confusion

“For some, the possibilities for self-creation and emancipation promised by modernity were exhilarating. For others, it has proven to be a serious social problem.”

Introduction

At the beginning of the 21st century, we find a number of scholars arguing that the global restructuring of political, social, and economic relations entailed in contemporary modernity involved a normalization of uncertainty—an increase in mobility, greater individualization and self-reflexivity. People are expected to make their own life plans, to be mobile, and to provide for themselves in various ways. This liberation is encapsulated by the very idea of cosmopolitanism: a promise of freedom for the individual from the imprisonment of culture and community—in country and church, in class and category. This emancipatory project has allowed the human subject to move between classificatory elements without stopping, without finally arriving, without definitive association; it’s perhaps a form of infinite disjuncture and liminality.

Commentators on the modern-day rise of “strong-man politics” in the West, however, have highlighted that this liberation and autonomy has come at a high price: the disenfranchisement of those who do not view culture, community, country or church as signs of imprisonment, but rather staples of security and certainty. The reaction towards this disjuncture and rapid cultural change perhaps ought to be traced back to what has been forcefully dismantled, which includes life routines, networks of human bonds, and mutual commitments. The reactionary pushback we are witnessing from post-modern conservatives in many countries is, in no small part, driven by anxieties produced by these tendencies. It is literally post-modern to desire a return back from the discontent produced by modernity. For some, the possibilities for self-creation and emancipation promised by modernity were exhilarating. For others, it has proven to be a serious social problem, which only an ironically post-modern turn back from modernity can resolve.

Individualism and Self-Creation

In many ways, modernity is as Jürgen Habermas described: a project of emancipation from human limitations and constraints. In many respects, its roots, therefore, go so deeply into the collective consciousness of freedom-loving Western individuals that it can be difficult to grasp the historical and psychological contingency of this modernist project properly. In the space below, we will provide a few examples to help clarify the incentives towards modernization, before analyzing what prompted the reactionary pushback by post-modern conservatives.

One aspect of modernity is what Max Weber described as the desacralization of the world—the declining belief that the world has sacred qualities which should make it immune to human manipulation and use. For some, this desacralization has proven a liberating moment. For instance, Slavoj Zizek consistently points out that believing that nature is simply a meaningless catastrophe enables us to have a great deal of freedom relative to nature. We can feel free to manipulate it at-will. To others (for instance, Jordan Peterson), desacralization is the actual problem. It is the catastrophe of meaninglessness, which encroaches on our lives.